


Conviction

by StormSeason



Category: Original Work
Genre: Aftermath of Violence, Alternate Universe - Original, Angst with a Happy Ending, Anxiety Disorder, Bipolar Disorder, Bodyguard, Crimes & Criminals, Demisexual Character, Demisexuality, Disabled Character, Domestic Fluff, Eventual Smut, Family Feels, Fantasy Politics, Found Family, Friends to Lovers, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Suicide attempt, Jail, LGBTQ Themes, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Mutual Pining, Nightmares, Nonbinary Character, Novella, Original Character(s), Original Universe, Other, Panic Attacks, Platonic Female/Male Relationships, Politics, Post-Revolution, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Prison, Prison Sex, Recovery, Revolutionaries, Romance, Roommates, Self-Esteem Issues, Sharing a Bed, Slow Build, Slow Burn, Strangers to Friends to Lovers, Wheelchairs, Worldbuilding, You get the idea, kinda... there's a dynamic anyway lol, survivor's guilt
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-21
Updated: 2020-12-19
Packaged: 2021-03-08 18:42:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 20,185
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27131302
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StormSeason/pseuds/StormSeason
Summary: An ex-revolutionary haunted by his all-too-recent past is awaiting trial in a country where he had just begun to think he might be safe. He forms a bond with another inmate who turns out to be his greatest comfort as well as a source of several unpleasant surprises.
Relationships: Gavin Johansen/Trystan Morek
Comments: 7
Kudos: 8





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Technically, no archive warnings apply outside of violence. There will be no actual suicide or police brutality during the course of the story, but both of these topics are heavily discussed at various points. Consider this a general warning for unpleasant incarceration themes and anything you might associate with that, including inmate-on-inmate violence, homophobic side characters and inhumane use of solitary confinement.

The booking cell Gavin awoke in sounded like its own realm of hell. Echoing shouts, banging and clattering, noise on every side, piercing his eardrums. He shared his tiny room with a drunken Cardean man probably in his thirties who kept shouting out through the barred windows. There was no clock visible, and no way to judge time.

They’d left no wheelchair with Gavin, simply placing his unconscious body on one of the two small shelves which served as bed frames for thin mats. He could still feel the trace of tranquilizer fading from his body, and ran his fingers over his neck where he’d been injected, but felt no mark. He was sure the tranquilizer was the only thing stopping from launching into another panic attack on the spot. He scooted to the edge of the bed and leaned over to splash water from the sink on his face and drink from his hands.

“Excuse me,” he finally said, keeping his voice as polite as possible despite the fact that at the moment, he loathed this stranger. “While you’re shouting, could you ask them if I can use the phone?”

“They didn’t even let you have a fucking phone call?” The man demanded.

Gavin didn’t bother to reply that he hadn’t asked for it until now. He wasn’t happy to be here either, but he wasn’t howling up a storm about it. What good would that do? He leaned back against the wall, pressing his thumbs into the corners of his eye sockets, where he could feel his pulse pumping in a migraine.

“Back off the door!” Shouted a guard, right into the face of the drunken man, and he stumbled backward. “Johansen — you’re getting transferred to gen pop. You can have all the phone calls you want in there.”

Gavin fully intended to take use of that, as well, but he said, “Sir, I’m invoking my right to a phone call while in booking,” and the guard rolled his eyes, but accepted.

Waving a baton, the guard barked for Gavin’s cellmate to get back into his bunk, and man sullenly obeyed. Through the entire interaction, Gavin’s lungs felt like they were too small to get him the oxygen he needed, envisioning a hundred ways each second this could launch into a bad direction.

He let the guard help him into the boxy, one-size-fits-all wheelchair, even though the man’s hands were far too rough, and Gavin could have easily transferred by himself.

Gavin’s call to Ari was brief, just to confirm that he was alive, that she had sent on all of his paperwork. Hearing her voice again was surreal, and he could hardly believe that less than 24 hours ago, he’d been in her car, on the way here. Talking to her was just enough that the world stopped tunneling like he was in front of a firing squad. Her voice was tight with concern, and he didn’t tell her that he’d panicked so hard the guards opted to tranquilize him.

He also did not say ‘I love you.’ He almost did. If there was ever a time it would be worth any potential awkwardness, it was now. He hesitated when the guard warned him that his time was up, and imagined being beaten to death in the morning having not said it again, but instead he just said thank you. She didn’t say I love you either.

But as soon as the line went dead, he was paralyzed with terror that he would never see her or speak to her again.

The officer pushed him from behind, out of his vision where he couldn’t see what the officer was doing, and Gavin couldn’t do anything as the bastard ran him over bumps in the concrete like he’d never pushed a wheelchair in his goddamn life.

After several long hallways, Gavin asked politely if he could push himself, and the corrections officer chuckled and said, “Not a chance,” so he sat docile, his hands cuffed uselessly in his lap.

Gavin’s own chair -- the one Ari had assured him was safe inside his apartment, the one he missed like a dear friend and which was massively more comfortable than this one -- didn’t have handles, for the very particular reason that Gavin didn’t want to be pushed. He’d sawed them off of one of his previous chairs himself, and bought the next one without them accordingly.

This had to be the most perfectly crafted combination of every one of his pet peeves that bordered on triggers. But they broke free of the chaos of the duo booking cells, into quieter corridors, past doors far too close together with closed metal plates locked over the peepholes, through which little sound could get out. The occasional muffled shout or thump on the door indicated they were occupied. Gavin tried to press down the cold horror at the thought.

_At least you’re not in there_ , he told himself.

The sound in the dorm-style cell they brought him to next was less hellish, more like any other crowd of people. Men were laughing, talking, arguing, sleeping, changing clothes, playing cards. Here he was allowed to push himself; a small but much appreciated freedom. During his short stay in jail in Ykatern, he'd been crammed in a cell with a dozen other protesters, most of whom he knew by name or at least recognized their faces. Here he knew no one, and the cell had at least fifty people, maybe more.

The phone was almost constantly occupied during the hours it was operating, and at night when he found it free and tried to use it, it was out of service. He observed that the phone seemed to be monitored by two men called Buddy and Cornflakes, who looked as different as two men in their thirties could. A few times, he spotted small exchanges happening.

The first night he didn’t even try to sleep, but neither did half of the people around him. The hairy guy on the bunk next to him mumbled to himself, rocking back and forth frantically, and someone down the aisle kept running into the bathrooms to throw up. Sometimes he didn’t make it, and everyone simply walked around the mess on the floor.

He’d missed two doses of his antidepressants by the time they got him his meds for his third night since self surrender. They denied his sleeping pills, claiming that he didn’t need them medically, but it wasn’t like he wanted them here, anyway. He’d rather not be knocked out cold, vulnerable and senseless for eight hours in a room full of strangers, no matter how much good REM he got out of it.

After a couple of days, he forged an acquaintanceship with an old half-deaf veteran, who frequently missed the call for medicine and asked Gavin to listen for him. Every morning and evening, a guard stood in the door and shouted "single dose!" and everyone who had medicine that they weren't allowed to carry on their person would hurry over, Gavin included.

He swallowed his dose every evening with room temperature water from a little paper cup, and the guard checked under his tongue. The veteran was serving the last half of his sentence for something he implied had happened while he was drunk, and he had a wrinkled and faded Cardean Defense Force tattoo on his bicep. They exchanged any books they got their hands on, and each burned through at least a book a day. Gavin had the good sense to not bring up politics, and for once kept his mouth shut whenever his new acquaintance said something he disagreed with.

It had been years since Gavin had even tried to sleep in the same room as a stranger. At home, he only slept after his routine of checking the locks on his doors and windows, taking his sleeping meds, and feeding the cat. And even in the safety of his own, quiet home, he often stayed up until dawn, or until he was too exhausted to read his books clearly, and having one last cigarette outside by the stairs before kicking into his “nighttime” routine.

But he couldn’t avoid sleeping here forever, so he had to try, accepting the risks and attempting to tune out the constant noise.

When he finally did get to sleep, he woke with a start more often than not. He wasn’t the only one who sometimes cried out in his sleep, but being spared that embarrassment came at the expense of having to listen to the haunted dreams of other inmates.

The jail didn’t show up in his dreams, like his subconscious only knew he was afraid and stressed, but hadn’t yet caught on to why.

Twice he found himself in a nostalgic dream wherein he wandered around his hometown in search of something. He walked, down the long wide roads, his shoes gathering dust from the cracked hard earth baked over the pavement.

The second time, a shout awoke him abruptly, and he was scrambling upright before he’d even registered what happened.

He didn’t try to sleep again that night.

Gavin finally got up the nerve to take a hasty shower at two in the morning on day six, keeping an eye on the door. He was joined by a young dark skinned man with short cropped hair — probably J’Kyrish, but is was hard to be sure without hearing him speak -- who took the shower head farthest from him. They didn't look at or talk to each other. When he left the bathroom fully clothed and utterly unharmed, he found himself shaky with relief.

Or maybe that was his body demanding nicotine. It was difficult to tell where withdrawal began and everything else ended, beyond the gnawing hollow feeling he recognized from other times he’d tried to quit. He knew smoking wouldn’t make any of this situation better, but the longing nagged and prodded at him, often completely at random. He caught himself touching his chest as if to take a pack of cigarettes from his breast pocket.

As it happened, every moment of his initial hearing was crisp and clear, so high definition that it hurt his head, and felt like it would never end.

But as soon as the guards pushed him out of the courtroom, his only vivid memory of the hearing was of standing at the podium - he'd insisted on it - leaning against the hard wooden edge, channeling his entire body and mind into every answer he gave. It was like debate team in high school, except back then his hands didn't tremble as he shuffled his note cards, and he didn't see life imprisonment or worse written in the face of every audience member.

"You did great!" Ari called across the space between his guards and the rest of the world, but of course she would say that.

Now, the only thing left to do was wait until his official trial. He told himself, with a desperate attempt at optimism he hadn’t seen in some time, that they had to let him off. _I didn’t do it. There’s no evidence that I actually did it._ And for what small comfort it was, he knew they wouldn’t send him back to Ykatern if he was convicted. They would want him safe here, under their watch, and besides, extraditing him to certain death would surely piss off their friendly relations with J’Kyris.

 _After my trial, I’ll be out of here_. He had to believe that. He told himself hundreds of times a day, all he had to do was make it through the time until his trial. He thought it as he forced down the bland, mushy jail food, and as he forced his bladder to relax so he could pee with half a dozen other men in line, and as his headache grew worse with each passing day without caffeine or nicotine and with only minimal sleep. _All I have to do is not get murdered, or incriminate myself. Discomfort won’t matter_.

He paid Buddy and Cornflakes a couple of items he ordered from the canteen to be allowed to use “their” phone. The luxury of Buddy looming over him the entire time came free of charge.

He requested Ari send him a copy of the transcript if she could get her hands on it, as well as any news articles that mentioned his case, and whatever useful and relevant legal information she could find on the web. No staples.

She told him she’d put more money into commissary for him, and he promised he would start paying her back as soon as he got out.

“Anything else?” she asked.

“More books.”

“Which ones?”

“Any. No, not the special ones on the bottom two shelves. I don’t want them getting stolen.”

He paused, distracted by a pang of longing for the familiarity of home, his bookshelves, his cluttered desk and the warm orange light of its lamp in the evening, his bed with his grandmother’s quilt, and the old gray alley cat who’d moved in with him slowly after he’d put food outside for a month, who now liked to sleep on his wheelchair when he wasn’t in it. “Uh… Something I can give away. Magazines, newspapers, paperbacks.”

“Roger that.”

“Thanks. How’s the cat?”

“She seems good. She doesn’t come out from under the bed while I’m there, but the food and water go down while I’m gone, and she’s using the litter box.”

“She’s just shy. Thanks for looking after her. I worry that if she gets out again while I’m not there, she’ll never come back.”

“Gavin… How are _you_ doing?” She asked, her voice saturated with love and concern. “I know this must be really hard on you.”

Being party to her sympathy was like trying to chug honey from a glass, viscous and saccharine, a theoretically nice and sweet thing that couldn’t be consumed like this, not by him. That was always the thing with Ari, wasn’t it? The more she did for him, the more ashamed he felt. So grateful that he became resentful.

“I’m as okay can be expected,” he said shortly. “My time is up. I’ll call you again when I can.”

“Oh… okay. Bye, Gavin.”

The last thing he heard from her as he took the phone from his ear was “don’t worry, you’ll be okay,” and despite how he’d reassured himself that she would somehow save him, how especially after their last conversation he had used that very thought to stave off whatever panic he could, he resented hearing it from her. As if she could possibly know how this was going to turn out - no one could. As if he was naive enough to believe that she was anything but a twig against the grinding cogs of a massive fucking machine.

Every so often fights broke out, always short-lived, usually insignificant — a few punches and shouts. A couple of times, guards or other inmates got involved. In the time Gavin stayed in this gen pop dorm-style cell, one incident stood out in his memory.

Rooted to his bed, watching as Buddy pinned Ransom to the ground, while Cornflakes sliced at the inmate’s face with a folded can lid. A flash of silver, shouts and a scream. Gavin’s entire body went cold, and he watched as the guards rushed in, pushing away the onlookers and dragging the three men apart. Ransom’s face, dark and handsome, now bled profusely, a trail of red splashing onto the clean beige tile floors as he was dragged away.

After that everyone walked around the blood on the floor, just like they had the vomit until some jail staff came in to clean it up.

Years ago now, before he came to Cardea, even before public executions became the norm in Ykatern, a body had been left in the road not far from Gavin’s mother’s house for over a week, back riddled with bullets. No one knew who it was, only how he had died, and no one dared touch it. And the city patrollers, who were supposed to report biohazards to clean them up, did nothing. Of course not. It was a message. A silent message, a stench in the summer heat that warned you even when you looked away.

When someone finally took it away, there was a dark stain on the ground, that was only partially cleaned by the next rain, and that rain didn’t come for weeks. Everyone just walked around it. No one talked about it. Sometimes Gavin had let himself stare at it for a moment on his way past. _This could be you, or anyone you know._

Gavin had his umpteenth panic attack quietly on his bed, until he couldn’t hide his hyperventilation from the guy on the bunk next to him, and rushed into the bathroom, which reeked of clogged toilet. In the accessible stall at the very end, he swallowed around a knot in his throat, and couldn’t tell if he was about to vomit or cry. He stared hard at his hands to ground himself on something, anything, examining the dark hairs on his knuckles, fantasizing desperately about a cigarette. Eventually his breathing evened out.

Ransom didn’t come back the next day, or the next…

Two separate people approached Gavin to “offer” their “protection” in exchange for regular gifts from the canteen. One of them was Buddy, to Gavin’s utter horror.

Gavin’s decline of the first offer (given on his third day in the unit) went as smoothly such a thing could, but this time he told Buddy he would think about it. He didn’t dare say no. In the mean time, he “let” Buddy “borrow” anything he wanted. He didn’t dare make another phone call.

It took less than two days before it became clear that the tenuous neutrality with Buddy would soon be unsustainable. He was weighing the risks of saying no versus the charges in commissary he would rack up, and the fact that he would really rather not be bound to anyone here in any kind of contract. If it was just a few weeks, he could spend the extra money, couldn’t he? Anything here was three times as expensive as on the outside, but he just needed to make it to his trial. He thought of Ransom and the blood on the floor.

“So, let’s talk about the details of your offer,” Gavin said to Buddy. He was relieved to hear that his voice came out steady and confident.

Cornflakes laughed. Buddy shoved him. “What details?”

“So, uh, say hypothetically that my commissary money was low, or out —”

“You best make sure that doesn’t happen, huh, Wheels?” He smiled, big and slow. “Wouldn’t want something dangerous to happen to you, wouldja?”

 _God damn it_. “Of course not,” Gavin agreed. “Uh, but you see, all my money is being sent through by my wife, so—”

“So you tell your wife to be on time with the payments, and keep the cash flowing.” He leaned down, so his face was less than a foot from Gavin’s. “I’ve been patient letting you think this _generous_ offer over. You gonna give me an answer now, or not?”

Hands on his wheels, Gavin started to back up, only to bump into something soft. He glanced over his shoulder to see Cornflakes gripping the handles of his chair.

“Let go of me,” Gavin growled, dread blaring alarm bells in his brain, and he just barely resisted the impulse to punch Cornflakes. “My account’s empty,” he lied. “And my wife’s not happy with me. Now let go of my god damn chair.”

“I’m sorry about your marriage problems, pal,” Buddy sneered, and Gavin suddenly had a new idea about how he might have gotten that nickname. “But you’re going to have a lot bigger problems here.”

 _Let go of me, let go of me, let go of me._ “I’ll— I’ll talk to her,” Gavin stammered.

“Good choice,” Cornflakes said, grabbing Gavin’s shoulder and giving it a shake in what could have otherwise seemed like a friendly gesture. “You go call her as soon as the phone’s free.”

He was going to panic if they didn’t soon. He could feel it building in him, a pressure in his chest threatening to explode, impeding his breathing. “Sure,” he said. “I have to go take a piss, so if you’ll excuse me…”

“Have fun with that,” Cornflakes said, giving his chair a hard shove. Buddy jumped out of the way, and Gavin grabbed the handrims, the spinning metal burning on his palms as he slowed it down before he crashed into a wall. Fucking hell. He turned sharply towards the bathroom, glancing back over his shoulder at the two men.

The problem with lying about Ari was that now he did have to call her and tell her, while Cornflakes leaned on the back of his chair and listened. Gavin felt like he could have cried, which was distressing in an entirely different way. He couldn’t cry in front of this bastard, especially not over this!

It was all too much, and performatively begging his ex for more money was the last thing he wanted on top of all that. Nevermind that he would pay her back as soon as he got out of here, and that she would have given it to him anyway. He didn’t want to make her worry or feel any more obligated to take care of him than she already was. Cornflakes standing behind him made all the hairs on his body stand on end, and his brain embodied the internal feeling of listening to fingernails scraping on a chalkboard.

He got the conversation over with as fast as possible, giving as few details as possible, vaguely telling her that he needed to buy more things. She agreed without hesitation, although she sounded concerned.

“Stay safe, Gavin,” she told him when he said he had to go.

 _What the hell do you think I’m trying to do?_ “You too,” he said instead, and hung up.

The more Gavin thought about it, the more he was sure that he’d sold out too easily. But what was he supposed to have done, try to take them both on singlehandedly? His self defense practice alone in his apartment was worthless here, and he’d gotten so out of shape.

He just needed to make it until his trial.

Maybe he would be better off checking into solitary, to have a quiet room to himself where he could finally sleep, let down his guard, and no one would harass him about “protection.” But people went mad in solitary, supposedly. Well, he was going mad here, and it wasn’t like he hadn’t lived alone for the past year and a half.

The next week was somehow even worse than the first.

Buddy seemed to get a personal kick out of harassing Gavin, and while his spending wasn’t breaking the bank, he certainly wasn’t being conservative. Gavin caught him trading some of his items with someone else in the bathroom for cigarettes.

Gavin found himself on the verge of tears far too often now. Some day all too soon, he would break down when Cornflakes touched his shoulder or Buddy raised his voice, and then they’d know they could bully whatever they wanted out of him, and it’d all be over.

One evening, as he sat on his bed reading which was almost all he ever did, a complete stranger took a seat in his wheelchair and he snapped. “Just fixin’ my shoe,” the man explained, but Gavin hollered over him, “What the hell do you think you’re doing? Is that your chair? You think that’s just a free fucking chair for anyone to sit in?”

Gavin hurled the book at him, and continued shouting him down well after the man had hurried away, apologizing. The book landed open, the pages crumpled, and Gavin glared at it, shaking from fury, nauseated from poor sleep, ready to shred the thing.

“I just want to go home,” he muttered to himself, and in that moment he didn’t care who heard him.

“Don’t we all,” droned the man on the bed next to him.

Gavin rolled onto his stomach and pressed his pillow over his ears, until he couldn’t shake the worry that at any moment someone would come at his exposed back while he lay there, unable to hear them approaching.

Gavin put in several requests to be relocated to a smaller dorm, some of which got no response at all, and when he did get any kind of answer, it was the assurance that he would be moved to a “better fitting” unit soon and that this placement “had always been temporary.” The stress was starting to make him physically ill.

Every time inmates were called up to be relocated, Gavin prayed he would be one of them, until finally he was.

“Civella, Imor, Avanccelo, Johansen, Smith!” A guard shouted into the relative quiet of the cell one morning, as Gavin lay staring at the little red 03:39 of his neighbor’s battery operated clock. “Get packed!”

Gavin opted to leave behind everything he’d lent out, never mind entirely what had gone missing when he wasn’t looking, which meant that he had next to nothing left. The drawstring bag, hastily stuffed with his blue scrubs, sat on his lap as he propelled himself towards the door. “Where are we going?” Asked a guy Gavin was pretty sure was Smith.

“Hell if I know,” grumbled one man, who smelled faintly of cheap tobacco.

God, Gavin wanted a cigarette.

At least this cell block, with its long sterile white hallways wrapping around three stories overlooking a simple empty cafeteria, was quieter, and much cleaner besides. Metal doors with little windows — glass, not shuttered closed — kept the sound mostly inside, though as they passed, he still heard snoring and talking in some. White bullet security cameras, mismatched against the eggshell walls, stared down at them, positioned strategically to cover every door.

They stopped at a cell door at last, and the guard dragged it open, metal echoing along the hallway.

“Morek must be in solitary again,” the guard remarked to the empty cell. “That’s yours on the left.” He indicated one of two simple metal beds, the one made neatly, not the messy one with the thin blanket thrown back like someone had just gotten up.

The guard stepped around to unfasten Gavin’s handcuffs. “If you need anyone to push you,” he said on his way out the door, “you can ask a guard. Or Morek, I suppose,” he added with a chuckle.

Like that was going to happen. “Thanks, but I’ve got it.” Gavin stretched his hands, his wrists popping as he swiveled them.

The door slammed shut, and he was finally properly alone, for the first time since before he’d self-surrendered.

Gavin set his stuff on the shelf by his bunk, surveying the room — a sink, a toilet, a tiny window high on the wall, and another shelf by the other bed bearing a battered paperback book, a county-issue jacket, and some crumpled up underclothes and orange scrubs.

Orange, Gavin noted, meaning his roommate had been marked as physically unruly or violent, as opposed to the default assignment of blue, like Gavin had.

Great.

There were no security cameras inside the cell.

It was laid out in such a way that coming in from the door, one could see every inch of it, but from either bed, you couldn’t see the toilet unless you leaned off the edge. The little wall of privacy looked like it might as well be made out of cardboard. 

Gavin lay down on his bed, noting the mattress pad was just slightly firmer and thicker than the worthless one he’d been occupying for the past week. Thank god for small blessings. He closed his eyes, sinking into the darkness and quiet with a sigh of relief.

Maybe his cellmate had just been given orange for resisting arrest, or struggling with an officer. He couldn’t blame someone for that.

Or maybe his cellmate would murder him in his sleep.

He was so tired of worrying about that.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In case it's helpful for quick reference:  
> Ykatern -- the country Gavin and Ari are from  
> Cardea -- the country this takes place in  
> J'Kyris -- shares a border with Cardea, lots of people go back and forth
> 
> I might upload a map if people are interested. Thoughts and feelings welcome in the comments!

The sound of the cell door screeching open and voices awoke Gavin. He scrambled upright, his arm flying out to the side as his heart began hammering.

He stopped. What was he reaching for?

The heavy flashlight on his nightstand, at home next to his own bed.

He put his arm down.

“You’re lucky you weren’t in there for a month,” the guard barked, and shoved an orange clad figure into the room.

The door slammed shut, and Gavin flinched at the loud sound before he could help himself. _Way to look tough_.

His cellmate stumbled but caught himself and straightened up. He was clearly Cardean, like most of the inmates here. This must be Morek: a clean-shaven twenty-something with a long face, a badly split lip, and a healing scab on his chin, and a couple more bruises on his pale arms. His shoulder length wavy dark hair bore a couple of small braids, half frayed and undone. Ill-fitting orange scrubs hung off his lanky frame, and he’d rolled his pants up around his waist in lieu of a belt.

He stared at Gavin, seeming equally taken aback by his presence. “Oh hi.”

“Good morning,” Gavin tried, offering a tight-lipped smile.

Morek’s eyes flicked to his own possessions, Gavin’s, and then back to Gavin himself, giving him a notable once over, more thoroughly taking him in. “I was wondering when they’d give me another roommate.”

Gavin had learned very quickly that you didn’t stare unless you were ready for a fight, and Morek had certainly passed some kind of threshold which, at least in gen pop, would have gotten him snapped at. Gavin didn’t dare break first, and started to wonder if this man was about to fight him.

Then Morek gave a tiny shrug, his eyebrows moving along with one shoulder, and tugged the jacket from his shelf, causing the book and half of his clothes to fall to the floor as he did so. He didn’t pick them up, though the already tattered book lay face down with a few more pages crumpled.

“I was transfered here this morning. My name’s Gavin.”

“Trystan.” Shrugging on his jacket, he plopped onto his bed, shoes still on.

“I’d say it’s nice to meet you,” Gavin began, “but under the circumstances that would sound…” _Facetious._ Wary of coming across as pretentious or showy, he searched for another word and opted instead for, “Well, you know.”

Trystan snorted. “You new to LCDF or just this block?”

“Both. It’s been, uh, ten days.” It felt like so much longer since his arrest, and yet he was amazed it was that long at all.

“Mmh. Your first time in?”

“In Cardea,” Gavin said. “Yours?”

“Nah,” came the simple reply.

With that, Trystan threw himself face down into the flattened off colored pillow, and was silent for some time, which Gavin didn’t mind at all. He spread his blanket back over himself, kicking it down to the end, and they both pretended to sleep. Maybe Trystan actually fell asleep at some point, but Gavin didn’t, following his mind in slow circles and attempting to will away his ever-growing headache.

Trystan warmed up to him a bit in the morning after returning from a shower (which Gavin opted out of), and Gavin learned that he was pleased with his accomplishment of having managed to sleep through a good chunk of his 24 hour sentence in ‘the hole.’

“Fucking hate it in there,” he said.

Gavin almost asked what he’d been put there for, but stopped himself. They chatted on the way to breakfast, and Trystan explained their schedule: showers in the morning before breakfast, ‘free’ hour where they could go in the TV room, library, or gym with approval. Rec yard twice a week. “And then I have seven shifts a week of cleaning, but it’s different every week. Different rooms, different times.”

“Did you get a choice?”

“Not really. It’s not an awful gig. Way better than plumbing, where they had me before. And it gets me some cash for commissary.”

“When do we get assigned jobs?”

“Usually you don’t get one ‘til you’ve been here a while. You might not,” he added, with a notable glance at Gavin’s half leg. “When’s your release date?”

“I’m on remand. When is yours?” Another thing you didn’t do: ask why someone was here.

“Six months, then I’m back on trial,” he said, flashing his teeth in a smile that didn’t reach his eyes.

Gavin’s heart fell at the idea of being here for six months, waiting and worrying, barely sleeping. But he had little time to ruminate, because they arrived in the cafeteria. He tailed his cellmate, through the line, but Trystan vanished as soon as Gavin had turned around with his tray.

At first, all Gavin could make of the cafeteria was a swarm of people, and the guards armed with batons standing at intervals along the wall. This place was just as loud as the dorm at its worst, if not louder. Not a single table was completely empty, so there went any hope of sitting alone. In gen pop, they’d simply received meals in their dorm in paper bags. Gavin knew just enough about Cardean prison culture to understand that your “table” was not just where you sat for meals.

This kind of social politics was utterly different from the night he’d spent in jail in Ykatern, all those years ago, in a simple old fashioned barred room, crowded with a dozen other protesters, most of whom he already knew.

A couple tables looked and sounded, based on accents, like they were mainly J’Kyrish. That made sense, with the open border, dual citizenships, and many cross-cultural marriages. And while Trystan had initially struck Gavin as being as Cardean as they came, he sat at the most crowded of these tables, easily one of the palest there. His eyes glanced over Gavin like they’d never met.

“Move it,” barked an inmate behind Gavin.

Gavin moved away from the serving station and ventured into the crowd. Though the tone of the noise was mainly conversations shouted over other conversations, lacking the overtone of distress or aggression from the booking cells, it still made his head swim, and though no one touched him, he felt people pressing in on all sides.

Past a group of men sporting tattoos of some mythic figure he didn’t recognize – and uncanny skeletal figure that he didn’t dare take a longer look at. He averted his eyes before someone could snap at him for staring.

“You’re new here.”

It wasn’t like he would ever forget Ykaternic, especially not when he still dreamed in it sometimes, but these days he only ever heard snatches of it at the specialty shop down the street, or when he was in enough of a mood to watch the Ykaternic National Broadcast recordings online.

“Yes,” he replied hastily, switching gears in his mind. “I, uh…” What could he say that wouldn’t make him sound clueless and vulnerable? “I’m fresh in from _gen pop_.” If there was an Ykaternic equivalent to the phrase ‘gen pop’ he didn’t know it.

Gavin followed the speaker, a handsome man with russet skin and knotted black hair, to join a handful of others, tagged on to the end of Evaree’s table, by the sound and looks of it. He nodded in thanks as one of them moved his tray so Gavin had room to park at the edge and set his tray down, but he stayed quiet.

In other times and situations, armed with conversation topics, smokes to share, and pepper spray just in case, he might have been eager to chat and strike up acquaintanceships. He could feel them observing him without looking, just as he did, and they chatted with each other as if he wasn’t there.

Only as he finished the last of his… whatever this bland mush of smashed up beans and rice was called, did one of the men ask his name. The speaker, Richie, a balding middle aged man, had a friendly tone, and Gavin noted with interest that he spoke with quite a strong Cardean accent.

The man who had initially invited Gavin over was Adán, and he had a little smile as he said, “It’s an honor to meet you, Gavin,” pronouncing it with the Ykaternic “ah.” Gavin wouldn’t have cared if it didn’t come with the distinct impression of being corrected.

Richie introduced the third member of the group as Bugs, who looked like he couldn’t be more than seventeen, and hadn’t said a word the entire meal. Bugs was the only one of them in orange.

With his cellmate off at his job, Gavin spent most of the day alone, finally able to properly sleep and relax somewhat, though he spent most of the time with his face pressed into his pillow, fantasizing about his dim apartment, with cigarettes and aspirin.

He opted out of an afternoon free hour when when he could have gone to the TV room or asked for access to the library, and reread the last book he had remaining for the second time. He imagined every other inmate crammed into one room, all fighting over the channels and who sat where. Boredom was vastly preferable. Maybe tomorrow he would try out the library.

He missed dinner waiting in line for the phone, and didn’t even get to the front. By this point he was more irritable than he could remember having been in a long time. His skull felt too tight around his eyes, and he almost punched someone who bumped into his chair by accident.

“Woah, man, calm down,” the inmate said, holding his hands up, and Gavin lowered his fist.

Evening arrived, along with his meds, a package, and Trystan’s return, all at once. He felt Trystan’s eyes on him as he took his dose and passed back the little cup, but when he glanced back, Trystan’s attention had returned to the abused paperback. Gavin recognized Ari’s friendly round handwriting on the package without needing to see the return address (who else would it be from?). It was thicker than he’d expected and the guard even remarked on that. It had been torn open and searched through already, and he wondered if they’d taken anything.

He recalled the time he’d caught Ari opening and looking through his mail. He hadn’t thought about that in some time. On an upswing of paranoia, ready to be done with their marriage and done with her meddling, that had been too far over the line. He’d shouted at her, bringing her to tears almost instantly. As far as he knew, she hadn’t done it again after that.

What did it matter? He’d had nothing in there to hide from her. It was more about the principal of the thing. The irony of it stung now.

Shoving those thoughts aside, he took out the contents, carefully, keeping track of Trystan out of the corner of his eye.

Good, she’d gotten a transcript of the hearing. And here were some news articles. He glanced through the headlines.

**Ykaternic Rebel Group Had Cardean Allies**

**3 Arrested, Accused of Espionage, Attempts to Hack NIS**

**Everything You Need to Know About the Situation in Ykatern** (Ari highlighted the sentences where their former group was mentioned, and the mention of the city they’d met in)

**Foreign Spies In Our Midst? Legal Alien Tried to Feed Secrets to Terrorists**

**Wheelchair Bound Spy May Be Bound For Prison** (Here Ari added a little doodle of a face rolling its eyes)

Gavin scowled, his reaction appropriately summed up by Ari’s illustration, and looked to see what else she had printed out for him.

He stared at the blown-up image of an ugly squash-nosed cat for a moment, and turned the page. Puppies carrying a long branch together. A few political cartoons. A handwritten note detailing two new trending videos. A page containing seven different screen-shots of a new joke format Ari apparently found especially funny. More cute animal photos. A magazine article about elephants. A book review from the Cardean Tribune.

“When I said send me important things from the web, this isn’t what I meant,” he muttered, but it made him smile.

“Anything good?” Trystan asked, not looking up from his book.

Gavin held up the photo of the puppies, and glancing at it, Trystan let out a surprised laugh. Gavin propped his thin pillow up against the wall and settled back against it to read through everything Ari had sent him.

The lights clicked out automatically at night, signaling it must be nine p.m.

“Hey, uh, fair warning,” Gavin said, his voice sounding too loud after such a long silence. “I snore. And sometimes talk in my sleep. Sorry in advance, but just leave me be.” He kept his tone measured, more guarded than truly apologetic. The underlying message was clear: bother me about it and we will have problems.

“Sure thing,” Trystan said.

He didn’t say a word when Gavin awoke with a gasp some time later, sitting bolt upright. But Gavin saw his cellmates eyes on him glint in the light from under the cell door, then they closed again.

He caught his breath, unable to remember what had woken him up, and cautiously lay back down.

“I don’t have much time,” he told Ari as soon as she answered, when he finally made it to the phone, his voice low and fast so the inmates behind him wouldn’t eavesdrop. “I need you to look someone up for me. Trystan. Morek. You’ll have to guess on the spelling. I want to know what he got arrested for, what he’s been charged with, any violent history, previous crimes, all that.”

“Okay… Are you alright? Is he threatening you?”

“No, he hasn’t done anything to me, but I’d like to know. And, uh, thanks for the memes.”

He heard her smile. “You liked them!”

“I wouldn’t go that far,” he teased. God, it was good to hear her voice again, and just talk like this. It felt like he hadn’t spoken to her in months.

“Your cat came out from under the bed today!” Ari informed him, after he’d updated her on his move between cells, omitting any details about Buddy. “She wouldn’t let me get close, but it’s progress!”

“A miracle is what it is. Consider yourself lucky. I fed her for more than a month before she would even come within twelve feet of me.”

“She’s still so bony,” Ari complained. “I think you should take her to the vet. Does she have her shots?”

“She turns into a demon when I try to pick her up. Besides, I don’t have money for a vet. I’m in _jail,_ Ari, I can’t take anything to the vet.”

It felt almost like the whole world out there ceased to be real as soon as the line went dead, and the phone in his hand became just another useless object.

"Why did you leave?" Adan asked abruptly one meal.

"Leave Ykatern?"

Adan nodded, his expression inscrutable. He seemed to have some kind of subtle authority at this table, but Gavin wasn't sure how far it extended, or what that meant if any of them got into trouble or a disagreement.

"My wife wanted to," Gavin said, a familiar line he hadn’t had to use in some time. "She felt it wasn't safe anymore."

"It's not," agreed Richie. "It’s a war zone these days."

"Yeah," Gavin agreed, cautious.

"You’ve been here a couple years," Adan prompted.

"Yeah, but there were riots and -" _and people getting extrajudicially executed in the streets..._ "You know, buildings burning down. Health care's good here," he offered, and wondered if that was too blatantly socialist and Cardean of him.

"Sure is," Richie chimed in.

Adán said nothing, and the discussion moved on to a vein surgery Richie had needed a few years previously.

In the following days, Gavin found Trystan to be a valuable resource, as someone who knew the jail, but also as someone to commiserate with, and lighten the mood.

“I’d sell a leg to get out of this damn place,” Trystan said one time, flashing Gavin a grin, his sharp jaw making it look triangular and too large for his face. "You got any to spare?"

Gavin scoffed and replied that he was using his remaining one and a half.

Trystan, like many of the men around here, was very comfortable in their confined space. He didn’t hesitate before stripping down, with no apparent care for if Gavin happened to be looking at him. Gavin, acutely aware of any sign of weakness he gave off, he followed suit.

Locked in the dark together each evening, he and Trystan began talking. There was nothing else to do, besides let their brains stew in silence.

“I always meant to get around to visiting Ykatern,” Trystan mused. “Got near the border a couple times though.”

That had to be a joke, right? “It’s not, uh, a great vacation destination, right now.”

Trystan laughed. “So I’ve heard. Didn’t one of our journalists get murdered there?”

“Several.”

“I don’t pay attention to the news,” he said dismissively.

“The sunsets in the mountains are beautiful, though,” Gavin told him wryly.

“Ha, I bet. I’ve been on the other side of them, up in northern J’Kyris. Up by Blackwater Ridge. You can see all the clouds coming in off the ocean.”

Gavin hadn’t expected to launch an entire conversation on sunsets, and was a little surprised to find that his cellmate was apparently a walking travel encyclopedia. Desperate as he was for any kind of normal, friendly conversation, this was as good a topic as any.

“I don’t really travel much,” he admitted, when they’d about exhausted the topic.

“Neither do I, anymore,” Trystan quipped back.

It became normal for them to talk in those dark hours before sleep, when they could barely see each others faces and they could almost forget about the rest of the jail.

While Trystan was out mopping floors, Gavin ventured into the jail’s shabby, understocked library, and checked out books for both of them. Trystan lamented that his favorite genre, dimestore detective novels which Gavin had always considered rather trashy, were still not to be found here, and they laughed about how the State probably thought it would give them ideas of new crimes to commit.

Maybe it said more about Gavin than anything else, the fact that he hadn’t made a new friend and clicked like this with someone in so long, shut away in his house, occasionally chatting with strangers at the park or arguing with someone online.

By the time they went to sleep after three nights of such conversations, Gavin had broken his “no discussing politics in jail” rule, and Trystan had regaled him with a raunchy story about a one night stand with a drug dealer, and while it had rather more emphasis on the one night stand part than Gavin wanted to hear about, he felt it was only fair to listen patiently.

They agreed on just enough niche or radical ideas to click, while standing on opposite sides of other spectra. Half the time, they ended up arguing opposite points from what they actually believed, and would sleepily give up.

“I don’t actually give a shit,” Trystan concluded after the two of them tumbled down a rabbit hole of listing all hypothetical criticisms of Cardea’s foreign policy. “As long as the border with J’Kyris stays open.”

“Well, I’m here,” Gavin said. “So I have to.”

Another night, Gavin found himself nauseated from exhaustion and yet feeling better than he had in weeks, atop his soapbox at what must have been well after midnight.

“Voting isn’t just about picking the lesser of two evils to have power over a society. Not voting isn’t actually going to help anyone. If you’re going to try to topple the government into anarchy, I can understand that position but this isn’t —” Gavin cut himself off, considered, and redirected his argument. “It’s a civic duty. You _owe_ it to the other people in your society to try to help make the society better.”

“And why do they need my opinion on what would make society better? It’s their society. They know what they want.”

“It’s also your society. It’s — you’re clearly very smart and resourceful, and you have something to contribute.”

“I don’t see any reason for me to haul my ass into a polling both every year, maintain a valid ID card and current address the rest of the time — which would mean having to keep a job to pay rent — just so I can ‘contribute’ my opinion on fuckin’… property taxes or whatever. Your socialist utopia and all sounds great but I just want the freedom to sleep where I want and eat what I want.”

“That food was made by someone,” Gavin pressed.

“Yeah, prison laborers,” Trystan shot back just as fast, and an unexpected laugh bubbled up from Gavin’s chest.

“Okay, alright, fair point.” Undeterred, Gavin launched onto a speech, one he was always ready to spill at the drop of a hat, about exploitation of the poor by the criminal justice system, and the irony of it in light of the Cardean constitution.

Trystan listened without comment, until Gavin abruptly realized he’d gotten so caught up in the spirit of the argument, he’d forgotten to consider his audience. He paused, a few thoughts catching up, and realized he’d come very close to making a complete ass of himself.

He’d gotten out of practice.

“You’re telling me,” Trystan said. “First time I got arrested was for sleeping on foreclosed property. The place was overgrown with weeds, and the bank obviously didn’t give a fuck. Only twelve nights in the pen, but it still sucked ass.”

And here was the other side to the life of someone backpacking across the country, living with no ID and no address.

“My tent was a better home than here,” Trystan retorted, when Gavin cautiously applied the word ‘homeless.’

He wanted to ask _why, what happened?_ For all their initial conversations, Trystan had made it sound like he was a tourist.

“Is that why you’re here?”

“Nah. This time it was for theft.” He hesitated, as if starting to add more, then shrugged, and dismissed it with a wave of his hand. “I just wish I hadn’t gotten caught. I know a lot of people like the free food and showers, but it’s _so_ not worth it.”

With the exact same blase confidence as he threw out any other anecdote, Trystan mentioned a past lover as _him,_ another small surprise, although now that it was out there, Gavin supposed he shouldn’t be shocked. He couldn’t tell if this was a small sign of trust, but he liked to think that he was an approachable ally. He’d certainly read a good number of articles in an attempt to be that.

In Gavin’s hometown, gender and sexual deviance were simply _not talked about_ , even when the silence formed a shape of its own. He hadn’t even met an openly gay person until he’d joined the rebellion, where everyone was already striking back against social norms, reaching for compassion instead of normality. In stark contrast to either of those was this place, where he’d had already learned a handful of new slurs through osmosis.

Was that what the orange was for — defense against undeserved hatred and violence? An underdog, sticking up for himself?

Of course, it didn’t mean anything virtuous, but Gavin found it tilted his favor slightly towards his new cellmate.

It felt like they could have talked forever, about jail food and books they’d read, places Trystan had been and Gavin had read about. But they were just as often quiet and sometimes it was an immense relief after the chaos of the rest of the cell block to simply have quiet company as they both read.


	3. Chapter 3

The first occasion Gavin saw Trystan fight happened before he could even phone Ari again. He meant to call her, but the lines were always so long, and he’d already wasted one meal without success. Frankly, he wanted to put off that wave of isolating loneliness he was sure would hit him as soon as they hung up.

One of the orange-clad inmates Gavin recognized by sight but not name jolted Gavin from his thoughts, darting towards the food line in the cafeteria and attempting to snag Gavin’s freshly laden tray from his lap.

Gavin threw an arm up instinctively, striking away his hand, the tray slipping forward precariously. Trystan, just feet ahead, had been turning away to go to his usual table. He moved faster than Gavin had ever seen him. Gavin scrambled backwards, away from the rapid fire swinging limbs and tangle of orange, along with several others in the line, shifting his leg to prevent the tray from falling.

Whistles blasted and two guards rushed over. Both inmates succeeded in getting a couple more punches in before backing up, raising their hands before the guards could drag them off each other. Crimson streamed from Trystan’s nose, and he leaned forward just enough that it fell onto the floor rather than his shirt.

It was over almost as soon as it had started, and Gavin’s heart raced as he adjusted the tray in his lap with a shaking hand, the other gripping the handrim of a wheel.

What the hell had just happened? He wasn’t even sure who had thrown the first punch. It must have been Trystan, right?

One of the guards swore, and made a call into the radio piece on his collar.

“Alright, Morek, do you need to go to medical?” He asked, resigned, as the other guard addressed the other inmate, who he still held with both arms behind his back.

“I’m fine.” Trystan spat blood onto the floor. His eyes flicked around at their audience, everyone else who had been in line, and when they landed on Gavin, he flashed him a bloody grin.

“Go to the bathroom and get cleaned up, then. And can you keep it plugged and _not_ get blood everywhere?”

The blood still spilled out from Trystan’s cupped hands, stark against the smudged and dirty linoleum floor. Gavin followed him without a word, passing Trystan’s tray abandoned on the floor.

He hovered nearby as Trystan leaned over the sink and started running the water on cold. It looked like the flow was already slowing, and he resisted the urge to offer advice or ask any kind of first aid questions.

“Uh, you really didn’t have to do that,” Gavin muttered. “Are you… okay?”

“Mhm. Not broken. It’ll stop soon. It’s cute that you’re worried about me though.”

 _Cute_?

“It’s pretty resilient,” Trystan told him, reaching for some paper towels. “Been broken a lot before. One time Denna straightened it out for me in the bathroom back at South. Hurt just as much as the first time, and had to heal all over again, but it’d been jacked up for a while. You should’ve seen it in my mug shot.”

If anything, the fight seemed to have made him more chatty and cheerful.

“You should head out, if you don’t want people to talk,” Trystan told him.

“Will they give you another lunch?”

“Pro’lly not.”

Gavin hesitated, but Trystan waved him away before he’d decided whether he ought to offer him his own lunch.

 _You pay people back when they fight for you_.

But he hadn’t asked for it, or needed it in that moment, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to encourage it to happen again.

“There’s no room for him at our table,” Adán said, not looking up from his food.

“It was nothing.” The moment was blurred in his mind by alarm and chaos. He still didn’t quite feel like had happened at all, like it was just another flashback that left him shaken and confused.

“Who, Morek?” Richie switched languages as Adán nodded shortly, though he lowered his voice. “I knew him back at our old lockup. You’re riding with him now?”

“He’s my cellmate. I didn’t ask — he was just there.”

“I wouldn’t fuck with him,” Richie conceded.

“Why not?” Gavin tried to keep his tone conversational, digging into the lukewarm beans, none of which had escaped from his tray in the whole ordeal.

“I’ve seen him take down guys as big as me. He looks scrawny, but he knows what he’s doing. He’s chilled out a bit, since coming here, but back at South he was an agitator. That —” Richie waved in the direction of where the fight had happened. “That happens to everyone. But I tell you, he goes looking for trouble.”

“Sometimes trouble goes looking for you,” Gavin commented as blandly as he could manage. “Not that it happened this time — but it happens.”

“Sure, but he could try a little harder to hide from it. I’m jus’sayin’. There’s some types you don’t want to get involved with, and I’ve heard some nasty rumors about why he got moved here.”

“What rumors?”

Richie backpedaled hastily. “Oh, people talk. It can’t all be true.”

 _Keep your head down and stay out of trouble_ , Gavin reminded himself, pushing back the urge to defend his new friend’s reputation.

No matter how likable Trystan — or anyone else in this place — might be, that didn’t mean he was worth getting entangled with, and today was an excellent reminder of that.

“I mean this utterly without offense,” Trystan said the next morning as he stripped to his boxers and stepped into his shower shoes. “But if you don’t shower on your own, the guards will force you. And if you start to smell, someone’s going to fight you.”

“I was going to go today,” Gavin muttered, though he honestly would have been happy to wait a little longer before braving the communal shower rooms.

Trystan stuck close by him as they joined the end of the shower line — somewhat closer than Gavin would have liked, but he didn’t comment. A guard paced back and forth along the line, and Gavin glanced up and down the hallway, noting the placement of the cameras.

Gavin wouldn’t have even transcribed the “greetings” one particular pair of young men shouted from up ahead in line. He wasn’t Ari, who shied from any profanity, but some words did not belong in his mouth, or anyone’s, especially not theirs.

As tempting as it was to shout back at them, Gavin didn’t need Trystan’s warning of, “Ignore them.”

“Do you know them?”

“They’re called the Uni Brothers. Not brothers, pro’lly never been to uni. They like to make a scene, but they won’t do anything to me. They know better.” He flashed Gavin a chilling smile.

The shower room was loud and smelly, as steamy as a sauna, voices and water and the sound of things being dropped all echoing off the tile walls, and it reeked of sweat and testosterone and even faintly of fecal matter. Everyone was shouting to each other and shouting over each other. There were only a few stalls, none with doors, and most men showered in rows of unconcealed shower heads, fully exposed.

As they checked in at the door, they were each handed a razor, which Gavin noted had a larger amount of plastic than he was used to, and the guard warned each of them to return it back as they left the room.

“The blade is locked in,” Trystan informed him in an undertone. “If it shows any evidence of being tampered with, the entire block goes on lockdown. So don’t try anything,” he said with a cheeky grin, and inclined his head to where another man in a wheelchair was parked. “Your spot’s over there.”

Gavin showered as quickly as possible, and didn’t shave. He spent every moment in that room hyperalert, attempting to keep track of everyone around him in the chaotic room.

But the Uni Brothers, who had been well in front of them in line, sauntered over as he finished drying off. Why did everyone around this place keep cornering him in pairs? His eyes flicked to the little bullet camera in the corner of the room, and he wondered if it would even be able to make him out through the steam. Not that it would matter, if they acted fast enough.

Keeping in mind Trystan’s words that they wouldn’t do anything, Gavin kept his head high, laying his towel modestly across his lap.

“Sup, Wheels. How’s your cellie treating you?” The blond one leaned over Gavin, a hand on the edge of the stall, which only went waist high. He had not wrapped a towel around any part of himself, and had incredibly toned legs. “Not scared to drop the soap, are you?”

“He’s been perfectly friendly,” Gavin replied curtly. “Not that it’s any of your business.”

The other one guffawed. “How ‘friendly’?”

Gavin glanced at his chair, just out of reach without shoving them aside. “Mind your own business.” He hastily toweled dry — or something closer to dry — and reached for the underclothes on his chair.

"We’re just having a little chat. We don’t want someone like you to get taken advantage of."

“He’s scarier than he looks,” agreed the other one, with faux seriousness and wide eyes.

“Thanks for the concern.” Gavin didn’t care that his boxers were going to get wet. He had others back in the cell.

“I heard he killed a guy,” jeered the blonde one, clearly impatient with Gavin’s lack of reaction. “Smashed his face on a bathroom floor til his skull caved in."

"I heard he shanked him,” the brown haired one said. “Jabbed him in the gut over and over til he bled out."

"Ooh, even nastier." The blond one turned to Gavin as he transferred back to his chair. "You really wanna tap that?"

Gavin didn’t grace this with a response, and set off back towards the exit.

“If he ever bothers you… don’t come running to us!” The brown haired one called after him, laughing.

“I wouldn’t touch that with a nine foot pole,” the blond one agreed.

A minute later, Trystan caught up with him in the hallway at a half jog, holding a towel to his chest. “They weren’t bothering you, were they?” He fell into a stroll beside Gavin.

“No,” he said shortly, and Trystan didn’t press.

He couldn’t shake the words of the Uni brothers from his mind, especially as he noticed other details, here and there about the jail. Trystan was not bluffing about the fact that people left him alone, and until the other day, Gavin had hoped it came out of mostly keeping to himself. ‘Keep your head down and avoid trouble,’ was once again seeming like a naive plan.

He called Ari again, hoping for news, and was only able to leave a voice message.

Gavin took to working out while Trystan was on shift and he had the cell to himself. Even before the arrest, he hadn’t had the energy or motivation for some time to do anything even minimal. Not that he had much energy now, but he certainly had motivation. He practiced his rusty self defense moves, as well as picking back up old body weight exercises and stretches.

Not that he expected this would do him much good in a real fight here. But he found it did help him get to sleep a little quicker in the evenings on days he’d pushed himself harder, or allow him take a nap to pass the time (and then regret it later when he was wide awake in the middle of the night, and neither Trystan nor books were available anymore).

Trystan never said anything even though Gavin was sure he still snored, and talked in his sleep, and sometimes made sounds.

“Everything okay?” Trystan asked, only the once, when Gavin woke up, hyperventilating. In his mind he was still running. He thought he’d screamed too, but couldn’t be sure.

Gavin told him to ignore it, and he obligingly didn’t bring it up again, despite the fact that it was clearly waking him up as well. It was the best Gavin could hope for, but he wondered what his cellmate thought. Trystan never snored, never startled awake in any audible way, never gasped when Gavin broke the silence of the night. Trystan certainly never woke up in tears, mumbling names.

Sometimes, he slept with his shoes on. Perhaps that was the equivalent of any of Gavin’s no-longer-relevant nighttime safeguards — double checking the locks, the motion sensor night light, the heavy flashlight by the bed stand. And Trystan was ready to run, just in case.

One night, Gavin found himself wide awake yet again. In his dream, he'd been hiding in the bathroom back in gen pop, and Ari had been there with him, her doe-like brown eyes wide with terror. She had looked as she had when he'd met her, thinner and shorter haired, a fringe falling over her eyebrows. The two of them had pressed together behind one of the stalls, barely daring to breathe, as black-clad Ykaternic soldiers searched the dorm. Her hand found his, and fumbled something into it, but it slipped, and fell to the ground with the softest clatter.

Thankfully the dream ended before they were discovered.

It took him a moment to remember where he was in time and space. And who he was with.

All his senses were on hyperalert, his ears sharpened for danger. So they picked out and honed in a the rustle of movement in the other bed, faint as it was. He recognized quickly a rhythmic sound with a completely different kind of alarm. Well, at least it wasn’t dangerous.

He resolved to go back to sleep and forget all about this, just as Trystan did for him. But that was easier thought than done. He lay still and stared at the dim tiles above.

Trystan was quiet, but the room was nearly silent, with no soft hum of the vents just then, so every so often Gavin’s ear would catch a carefully measured breath. _It_ _’s just something we have to deal with,_ Gavin told himself. _Part of sharing a space with someone._

He hadn’t so much as tried touching himself since before his arrest. The stress and anxiety had beaten his already low libido into almost nonexistence. He had no desire to try to get off in the showers or bathrooms (though the men as a rule ignored each other doing that), or here in the cell, in front of Trystan. The antidepressants were certainly helping something there.

This was fine, this was nothing, Gavin told himself. Trystan held his breath for several seconds, and then rustled in his bedsheets again and was silent, leaving Gavin frustrated and alone in the dark with his thoughts, for who knows how long.

Through a post-dinner conversation, Gavin learned that Trystan had first been apprehended by police at twelve, having attempted to run away from his foster home. In retelling the story, Trystan mocked all parties equally, giving his past self a whiny nasal voice, and the police exaggerated eastern drawls. He managed to get Gavin to laugh a couple of times.

“They weren’t wrong,” Trystan concluded in his own voice. “I was a little shit who didn’t know the first thing about living on the streets. I just didn’t want to deal with the boys in that foster home.”

“What was wrong with them?”

“What wasn’t wrong with them? Group homes are kind of like here. Everyone’s fucked up in some way, and they’re all ready to throw down at the drop of a pin. There’s always some kid who would rather fight than sit down for dinner on time, and someone accusing someone of stealing their stuff, and some kid who’s 14 but can’t say more than a couple words, and someone who just got dropped off last night by their parents and are still pissed off about it.

“It sounds like a mess,” Gavin agreed.

“Add that to teenage hormones and general youth stupidity…”

“I bet. Towards the end, it was hard enough with just my brother and I, plus whoever else my mom had staying over. It was always my brother who got in real fights, though. He got sent home from school a few times for it. But it’s not like I can say I never fought anyone when I was a teenager.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Not often, but sure. A couple of times when my classmates were being pricks and I thought I was tough. It didn’t improve anything.”

“Noble reasons.”

“Hardly. I was… well, you know.” Gavin waved a dismissive hand, chuckling. “I knew all the neighbors and spent my free time in the streets with the other boys playing whatever sport or game thought was cool at the time.”

Trystan leaned forward on his cot, grinning, as Gavin told him about the wide dirt roads of his hometown and playing kickball in the evenings before dinner. “We went through a phase of sword fighting with sticks. I was constantly bruised, but I got to be decent at it. Of course, that was well before this.” He nodded down at his missing leg.

“Mister Athletic over here,” Trystan teased.

That hadn’t been true for years, but he didn’t contest it.

“I was so ready to be done with fighting,” Trystan said later, after the lights had gone out. “I thought, as soon as I got out of the system, I’d be done. Fresh start.”

 _Instead here you are,_ Gavin thought. He made a simple sound of understanding. It was hard not to chime in, with statistics about the funneling of former foster children into the prison system, bringing up books and articles he’d read online about the way one system fed directly into the other.

Had he wondered as much as Gavin had if prison was inevitable? Had he spent his young adult years with it looming over his head as a prophecy, ignored and waved off, until it happened, and it was too late?

Trystan didn’t say anything else, though, and they lay together in silence for a long time.

Unfortunately, the more they got to know each other over those first two weeks, the more Trystan seemed to feel he belonged in Gavin’s personal space. At first it was barely remarkable, just leaning in too close during conversations, or standing too close by. Hardly something you could tell someone off for, especially not when you shared such a small space and they were the only person you actually had a good relationship with here.

And then he began the habit of resting a hand on the handles of Gavin’s wheelchair while they waited in line, and Gavin would roll forward just enough to shake him free, or clear his throat pointedly. Once while they were talking, he even propped one of his feet on Gavin’s footrest, and Gavin kicked him in the shin, which apparently wasn’t a thorough enough “don’t fucking do that.”

One evening he tried sitting on Gavin’s bed, and Gavin’s attempt to not say anything vanished with a firm and simple, _“No_.”

For a second, Trystan just looked at him, expression unreadable, and Gavin was steeling himself to snap at him, to back his words up with fists if he had to. But Trystan stood and retreated to his own bed without comment.

But it didn’t really solve the problem. He didn’t try to get on Gavin’s bed again, and it wasn’t anything worth getting in a genuine fight over, but finally one day Gavin snapped.

He’d heard plenty of stories of rec yards, and how they were brewing grounds for shankings and gang fights, so he had been staying inside, or spending that time in the library, where he made acquaintanceship with an older Evarett man named Moriine who had a terrible grass allergy.

“That’s stupid,” Trystan told him bluntly, when Gavin explained why he never went outside. “If someone wanted to jump you, they could have done it in the cafeteria. Come on. It’s good to get outside, you’ll see.”

And he reached out as if he was going to touch Gavin, perhaps to slap him on the shoulder or grab one of the handles on the cursed jail wheelchair.

Gavin whirled, swinging his fist straight through where Trystan had been a moment ago, but his cellmate nimbly jumped back.

“Woah, woah.” Trystan put his hands up, laughing as he backed away, but his laughter died as he saw Gavin’s expression. “Uh, sorry.”

“How do I have to make it clear to you not to touch me?” Gavin bellowed. “How god damned hard is it to keep your hands to yourself?”

After that, to his credit, Trystan didn’t touch him at all anymore, and kept a much more careful distance.

“I would kill for a cigarette,” Gavin grumbled into the phone.

“Don’t say that,” Ari chastised.

“It’s a figure of speech, calm down.”

She made an unhappy sound, but let it go. "I looked into that guy you asked me about. Is he still your cellmate?"

“Yeah, he is.” It felt, especially the longer and better he knew Trystan, like an invasion of privacy to have Ari still digging into his past. “He’s alright, I think. He can get annoying, but we get along.”

“Hm. Well, he’s got a bit of a violent history.”

“I’d kind of figured that,” Gavin said.

“Are you scared?”

“Of him?” Gavin hesitated. _Not really, honestly_. Despite his other complaints about his cellmate, he was past expecting Trystan to attack him. Even when Gavin had hit him first, he hadn't hit back. “Should I be?”

“I’m not going to tell you to be scared,” she said. “Just be careful.”

“I’ve got time. Start from the top.”

“His status is listed as awaiting trial,” Ari said. “Assault, second degree murder, and inappropriate conduct in detention.”

Gavin let out a hissing breath between his teeth. “He neglected to mention that.”

“I wonder why,” Ari said quietly.

“Anything else? Do you have any details on that?”

Except for the name of the institution it had happened at, she had found nothing. It made sense that, unless Trystan had murdered someone especially famous, this wouldn’t make it to the news. “I put in a request for information, but the county hasn’t gotten back to me yet.”

Everything else was old news or fit well with the snippets of his past that Gavin knew. Now twenty two, much of the past four years of Trystan’s history revealed almost nothing to dig up. No social media accounts under his name, no findable jobs, no current address. He had entered the foster care system at six years old, and had quite the record of running away, enough that multiple homes and families had turned him down. Once he got older, reports of fights and violent behaviors became more common, causing him to be transferred into a reform school.

“And I’m guessing he got in more fights there?”

“It only says he graduated.”

“Well thank god we know that.”

Gavin, after careful consideration, decided to keep this conversation to himself.


	4. Chapter 4

Trystan had accepted that he might never get his stuff back. But he liked to imagine the day they opened the back door of the jail and dropped him out in the alley with a sealed plastic bag of everything they'd confiscated at his arrest.

Last time, a different city, a different jail, they'd only given back about half of the contents of his backpack not including the backpack itself, and he'd had to buy a new one. The new one had been better anyway. Military surplus, durable and weatherproof, and it carried twice as much. Twenty dollars secondhand, and worth every cent. Everything in it was replaceable, but they had better give that back. And his coat. A battered brown thing that had once been soft on the inside, but still kept the cold out. That jacket had been through a lot with him. Maybe too much.

So they'd drop him outside with his coat and his backpack, and the sky would be just the right amount of cloudy. A light breeze, just enough to flutter in Trystan's hair. Even vicious winds tugging at his clothes might be a nice change, or a refreshing cold rain. Hell, it could even hail. He would still walk, hands tucked inside his pockets, hood on tight. He'd walk until he got tired, and there wouldn't be an end to the corridor or a guard telling him to stop. Through the streets, past tall refurbished stone buildings and short painted ones, into the suburbs, out of the suburbs, past ditches and road sides, into the country, and the darkness as night fell. He could see the stars again.

"What did you used to do on the outside?” he imagined someone asking.

"Walk," he’d reply, with a smile at how simplistic and stupid that sounded.

Gavin was by far the most interesting thing that had happened to Trystan in a while. The more Trystan noticed and learned about him, the more intriguing he became.

There seemed to be something inside him, like a machine running, or an animal ready to fight. His gruff demeanor and wariness, the way you could see the tension he carried in his body, reminded Trystan of certain seasoned gangsters or ex-marines.

 _Oh, he_ _’s always ready for a fight,_ one might think, _so I better not fight him_.

Perhaps, Trystan had initially thought, he was not unlike Trystan himself: someone who might look physically vulnerable, but could be dangerous when he had to be.

And he was beginning to wonder if Gavin might have actually done something big, bigger than any of them.

Except underneath the aggression, the overly polite caution, the swinging fists, even the political rants that made him sound like the kind of person who would get himself arrested… underneath all that he was terrified. Despite having great arms and being ready to punch someone two seconds after waking up, Gavin didn’t believe he would win in a fight. Which was probably reasonable, given his disadvantage.

At the end of the day, he was still a rookie, missing one leg from just above the knee, a bit chubby in the stomach, taking meds for something, and sometimes even woke himself up crying.

Trystan found it immensely satisfying to see past that bristly exterior.

Also he was handsome.

Not distractingly, head-turningly hot in a conventional sort of way, but enjoyable to look at. Bold brows over bright golden-brown eyes. Strong square jaw behind a short beard. His prominent nose curved down and his dark hair hung over his forehead in chunks and stuck out in the back. More dark hair spiralled across his soft chest and down his stomach, and swept across his forearms. He had a nice ass too, but he’d made it pretty damn clear Trystan was not welcome to learn more about that. Oh well.

His reprimand the other day stung more than it should have. It echoed in Trystan’s mind — _How god damned hard is it to keep your hands to yourself_?

Pretty god damned hard, apparently.

It didn’t matter that Trystan hadn’t even been trying to fuck him or fight him or steal something from him. It didn’t matter that Trystan had simply been eager just to touch his friend, in any way he could get away with, just for a moment.

That was probably creepier, actually.

He enjoyed Gavin’s company too much, even if Gavin didn’t actually care. Nothing good could come from getting attached or personally invested in what Gavin thought of him, he reminded himself. As soon as Gavin learned what happened in August, this would all be over. He would treat Trystan like just another threat to be carefully navigated, careful not to offend him or turn his back to him.

He would find out sooner or later.

Rigo and Trystan never really talked. Rigo was getting out a week from now, and neither of them had anything to say to each other about it. Sure, Trystan would miss him, but only because without him, he’d be back in his own little bubble again, like a hamster in a plastic ball, rolling around and bouncing off other hamsters in other balls, except when the balls broke and they tried to rip each other to shreds.

When they could find the time and place, fooling around was something to look forward to. Rigo wasn’t especially remarkable or exciting in and of himself. They had no chemistry, and he was unreadable and distant, silent, his expression pretty much the same whether or not he was two seconds from orgasm, and most of the time all they could manage to sneak in were hasty hand jobs, so what was even the point?

Just to physically connect with someone, really. To feel like a human with another blood and flesh human.

Afterward, they fixed their clothes, and pretended nothing had happened.

“What do you think it means to be evil?” Gavin asked one night.

The question put Trystan immediately on guard, and he skimmed through their previous conversations in his mind, deciding that no, it wasn’t too far off from their normal discussions.

Still. It wasn’t something he liked to think or talk about.

“Evil is when you actively seek out immoral deeds for selfish purposes,” Trystan intoned. “You invite spirits of corruption into your soul, which will ultimately consume you, leaving nothing behind but a hungry ghost, damned to wander the plains of existence for eternity, driven only by greed and misery, leaching off of the health and vitality of the living whenever possible, but it will never be enough to satisfy you.”

Gavin was silent for a second, then barked a laugh. “I was on board with the first part. You don’t actually believe the rest of that, do you?”

“No, I think it’s a load of horse shit, but be careful what you laugh at. Half of the people here probably do believe it, at least a little bit.”

“Huh. I’ll be honest, I’m not as well-versed in Cardean folklore as I should be.”

“I’ve heard more about it than I’ll ever have use for. Most people you meet here on the east side think of it as like, a metaphor. But there’s a Believers table.”

“Is that the one with…” He paused, considering how to describe it. “The tattoos,” he said simply.

“Oh, the Glaowrich?” Trystan sat up to make a snarling face at him, hooking his fingers into claws. “Creepy ass skeletal thing?”

Gavin chuckled. “That’s the one.”

“Nah, that’s the Revellers’ symbol. Complete opposite. It - some people say she - is like the ultimate personification of indulgence. It's the nastiest and most powerful of ghosts. Not all sects even mention it, but it became a symbol of people who have turned their back on the faith and embraced corruption.”

“What like atheists?”

“Sometimes. Atheist is an odd word, since we don’t have gods," he teased.

“You know what I mean.”

“Yeah. But you’ll meet some Revellers who do genuinely still believe in all the lore. Eventually you become saturated in corruption and nothing you do can change your fate. At which point, fuck it. Might as well do whatever you want. They’re all about hedonism. It’s not just in the prison system, either,” Trystan added. “You meet ‘em out in the wild. Surprisingly accepting, lots of queer and kinky weirdos, but some of them are exactly the kind of selfish psychopaths you imagine.”

“Do you spend longer as a ghost the worse you are? Is it worse? Does raping and murdering people give you the same level of eternal suffering as, I don’t know, overindulging in sweets?”

“Depends who you ask. Usually the worse you are, the longer you suffer.”

Trystan didn’t bother asking people. He’d learned about this in school, in his various group homes, and through osmosis growing up, and that was more than plenty for him. He’d never once been interested in the theology and cultural intricacies behind it.

“I think I read something about those evil spirits being contagious,” Gavin prompted, after a pause.

Trystan made the verbal sound of a shrug, and said, “Maybe they’re not entirely wrong.”

“Of course they’re wrong! Bad behavior comes from your brain and your choices. They aren’t germs. You can’t cough on someone and make them evil.”

“Well, duh. But you’ve been here. You’ve seen how this shit gets to people. The more time you spend around violent people and thieves and unpleasant assholes, the more likely you are to become like one. Yeah, it’s not ‘cause of spirits, but it still happens. You can kinda see why they thought that way.”

“Interesting, interesting. So are there good spirits that are contagious?”

“I’ve never heard of them. You just have to make people behave properly, and eventually the bad spirits leave and they stop wanting to be bad. In theory.”

Gavin started to say something, then switched tracks. “So that’s the justification behind all the labor with next to no pay.”

“Don’t talk nonsense. We’re a secular society.”

“Ha.”

Trystan rolled over, turning his back to Gavin, and announced that he was going to sleep.

“You never answered my question about what you think,” Gavin chastised lightly. “Good night.”

Trystan came back to the cell one evening covered in dust. All over his shoulders, in his hair, down the front of his shirt, and on the cuffs of his pants. He stripped down to his boxers and undershirt and shook out his scrubs. “It’s a high risk job,” he said, shoving his shirt into the small sink so he could rinse it.

“I can tell,” Gavin agreed, amused.

“Anything remarkable happen to you today?”

“I skipped lunch to call my ex wife,” Gavin said. “She renamed my cat. She said, ‘I’ve started calling her Catherine now’ — instead of just Cat. I told her she couldn’t just go renaming my cat, and the damn thing’s already gotten attached to her far too fast. And she said it was like ‘naming your child human.’” He scoffed, and as irritable as he sounded, he was clearly amused by the whole thing.

Trystan turned around, leaving the water running. “Your ex wife?” he repeated, eyebrows raised.

“Uh, well technically we haven’t gotten an official divorce yet. We’ve been separated for over a year though. My friend — the one who sent me the package?”

“You didn’t mention she was your ex wife!” This new revelation delighted Trystan. “How old are you? I imagine anyone with an ‘ex wife’ to be a balding bachelor at least in his late thirties.”

“I’m twenty four.”

“Only twenty four, shit. I assumed you were older.” Trystan squelched the shirt around in the sink, which was low to the ground for accessibility, requiring him to bend over awkwardly. “How long were you married?

“Three years. Well, technically four. We, uh…” He trailed off for a moment. “I was nineteen when we got engaged.”

“You didn’t strike me as the type to get married right out of high school.”

“It’s not uncommon, where we’re from. A lot of kids I knew didn’t even finish our equivalent of high school. My mom would have expected me to have at least one kid by now.”

“And you didn’t?”

“No.”

“Three years is plenty of time to make a baby,” Trystan teased. He wrung out the shirt and hung it to dry over the metal bar on the foot of his bed — or the head. The two sides were identical, but Trystan usually slept with his head to the wall. Sometimes he switched it up.

“We, uh, wanted to wait until things were more stable. With our living situation, that is,” Gavin added with a grim chuckle. “Ykatern was dangerous during the uprising, and then we immigrated here and had to get settled.”

“Whose idea was the divorce?” For his pants, Trystan just put the ends in the sink, and rinsed these much less thoroughly.

“Mine.”

“Why?”

Gavin sighed. Trystan had a feeling this was either going to be a very long story, or hardly one at all. “I realized I wasn’t in love with her,” he said after some thought. “And that I never had been, and that I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life pretending to be.”

“Wow,” Trystan said. “You seem on good terms, considering all that.”

“It’s been a year and a half. And she’s — I still like her. She’s a very kind person, and we’ve been through a lot together. She’s my friend, and I don’t know where I’d be without her — probably still here, actually, but a lot worse off.”

“How did you two meet?” Trystan asked, perching on the edge of his bed.

“Through our network of, uh, mutual friends and acquaintances.”

Ah. There it was again. Trystan prodded cautiously at it. “I’m sure they were all very reputable sorts, who never committed any crimes.”

Gavin laughed despite himself. “Shut up. Yes, those people. That was before anything we did was blatantly illegal in Ykatern. We were just protesting and advocating, nothing that was illegal there or here. All peaceful, waving signs and shouting, no setting fires or riots you hear about in the news now.

“Anyway, Ari and I became friends. We didn’t have a lot in common outside of the work, but I enjoyed her company, and we ended up spending a lot of time together. She later told me she was in love with me from the moment we met. Of course, she couldn’t have actually been _in love_ since she barely knew me, but she had — that spark, or whatever.”

Trystan was quiet now that he’d managed to get Gavin kickstarted. Gavin was kind of like a lawnmower, Trystan reflected.

“I liked her and I didn’t… know what romance was supposed to feel like. I wasn’t sure it was real, honestly. People married people of the opposite sex whom they liked, or for practical reasons. Everything else, the stuff plays and songs are made of, was just physical urges, and exaggeration as far as I was concerned. We'd been together for a while before it really sunk in that all of that was something everybody else did feel, and she felt it for me, and I was supposed to feel it back but didn’t.”

Trystan made an understanding sound, although he couldn’t exactly empathize.

“She helped me adjust after my accident, and we left everything behind in Ykatern together and came here. And I did _love_ her — and I still do. It just wasn’t in the way she wanted. She might as well be my family now, as complicated as that can be sometimes. And I think she might still have feelings for me. I know she did for a good while, anyway. I’m not sure about now.”

Trystan nodded.

“You’re… bisexual, right? I mostly hear you talk about men.” Gavin spoke carefully, like he expected to be corrected, or to slip up and say something offensive.

“Yeah, something like that. Lots of people are hot, but men are easier to snag for one night stands.”

“I never understood the appeal of that, personally,” Gavin remarked. “I don’t understand why you would settle for just anyone who happens to be willing to have sex with you.”

“Not _anyone_. Besides, you really don’t understand settling for someone you aren’t into?”

“That’s completely different! I wasn’t in it for the sex. That was… I would have been fine without that.”

“Right, ‘cause you weren’t into her.”

“Well, that aside. If it doesn’t mean something, I don’t see why people can’t just — you know, handle it themselves. It always seemed bizarre to me.”

Trystan laughed. He’d gathered as much — although he hadn’t been sure why exactly, Gavin wasn’t exactly subtle. “It’s about a connection for me too, in a way. Think of it this way: sometimes you get tired of talking to yourself in a mirror, and you want to talk to someone else.”

“I… suppose,” Gavin said, brow furrowing.

“Was it only ever Ari, then?” Any moment now, Gavin was going to decided he’d already vastly overshared. Despite the fact that they talked all the time, he somehow managed to be rather reserved about details of his personal life.

Gavin nodded. "I had female friends before and during our relationship, but of course I wasn’t going to try to date any of them.”

“You never found any of them attractive? Did you ever in your entire life look at a girl and want to fuck her?”

Gavin’s frowned even harder in disapproval, and Trystan gave him a glib smile. “I — Well, Ari and I did have sex, you know. And I was, er, amenable to that, on occasion.”

Trystan raised his eyebrows, and Gavin, leg bouncing, looking rather uncomfortable, added, “I never wanted any part in men around talking about wanting sex and women they found attractive. But I chalked it up to -- I was a feminist, and my mother raised us to respect women as people, and not judge them for their looks —”

Trystan burst out laughing. "I love that! ‘I promise I’m straight, listen, I’m a feminist!’”

“I wasn’t gay either,” Gavin argued, and it was hard to tell how close he was to genuinely being ready to shut down the conversation.

“Wasn’t?” Trystan prompted.

“I’m still not,” he corrected. “Look, I don’t even know why I’m answering all these questions.”

Well, it wasn’t like Trystan had really expected any other answer.

When Gavin was invested he talked with his body, a hand spinning emphatic gestures, his leg - the one not severed at the knee - bouncing. Trystan imagined Gavin as someone who used to pace. He would shift in his seat and lean in, like he was sharing some kind of secret of immense importance, and then be thrown back by the force of whatever it was he was talking about, his hands flying into the air with exasperation.

"So they had to shut down the strikes, right? And what better way to do that than by splitting up unions? That’s where the anti-union propaganda comes in. I don’t know if you’ve seen any of the historical posters, maybe online…? No? Well they had some great sayings. One of the big ones was about how unions are a cancer to society,” he said with a chuckle. “They had all sorts of comparisons to a tumor you have to cut out.”

Just watching him was interesting on its own. All you had to do once you got him started was sit moderately still and occasionally interact in some way. Trystan learned very quickly that Gavin wasn't deterred by passive signs of boredom. You could yawn and wander off, even blatantly tell him you didn't care, but if he was on his soap box, he would just follow you and talk louder and say "No, listen," and try to make you care.

And maybe it would have been effective on someone else. Maybe it was Trystan's moral and intellectual failing as a person that he just didn't care that much about the history of capitalism in the banana industry, but Gavin gave him the benefit of the doubt and seemed to believe that he could convince Trystan to care about anything if he just talked about it long enough and presented the correct arguments. It was as if he believed Trystan's agreement in any particular stance was like a spinner lock where you could try as many times as you wanted and as long as you got the right code in the end, it would still open.

"It's not that I don't agree with you, it's just that I don't want to talk about this for two hours," was a possibility Gavin frequently seemed to forget existed.

He was possible to derail, though, and he would shut up if you gave him a good reason, like that it was time for a nap, or a CO was listening. Especially considering how eager Gavin had been to sleep through most of Trystan's early attempts at conversation, it was kind of sweet that he got disappointed when Trystan announced he was done with the discussion.

Trystan enjoyed poking holes in Gavin’s arguments, more for entertainment than because he actually gave a fuck about whether or not the free market economy led to exploitation of farmers. He kind of gave a fuck, in a distant sort of way, but mostly it wasn’t relevant to his life. But sometimes Gavin’s passion, as jaded and bitter and cynical as it was, clicked with Trystan. Perhaps because it was jaded, bitter, and cynical.

“Do you actually believe that any of this makes a difference, us sitting in here and talking about this?”

Gavin was silent for a moment. “I suppose not, not in the grand scheme of things. I used to… I used to believe I was doing things that made a difference. I don’t know if I was.”

“In Ykatern?”

“Yeah.”

Trystan's dreams of Kosta were bizarrely lacking in violence. Every memorable dream for weeks after _it happened_ featured Kosta.

Often they had been simple inclusions. Kosta sat awake in the bed next to him. He did not stare like a ghost in a horror movie, nor did he talk. He was simply present. Sometimes one of them turned away to go back to sleep.

Or another common one, which for some reason alarmed him much more: Trystan was walking down the street on the outside, and he passed Kosta going in the opposite direction, and he woke up with his heart pounding.

They rarely spoke in these dreams. Once they spoke through the cell bars of solitary, Trystan sobbing and shouting apologies and Kosta made it clear, without words Trystan could remember upon awaking, that he would never forgive.

That dream was the most haunting, seconded only by seeing him on the outside. Both were easily far worse than the ones where Kosta's bleeding body lay in front of him, or decayed as Trystan tried to talk to him. Shouldn't those be worse? The body didn’t alarm him as much as he felt it ought to.

He always knew Kosta was dead. At no point did he forget that, even in the dream.

 _Nothing happens when you die_ , he began telling the phantom in his room, when he'd ceased to be paralyzed by guilt. _Ghosts aren_ _’t real and you don’t exist anymore_.

That did nothing. Kosta didn't listen to the fact that he couldn't exist.

Eventually Trystan used his lucidity to simply wake up as soon as he recognized it as one of those dreams, and he became able to identify them before Kosta even appeared, so he didn't have to face him at all.


	5. Chapter 5

“I don’t care if it would ‘especially difficult’ for me,” Gavin had told Ari during one memorable conversation back in their old apartment. “It’s not like it’s easy for anyone. If I accomplish anything at all, it’ll be worth it. I’m just one person, and if I have a break down over a strip search, so be it.”

He’d been willing to accept that risk, then. When he’d actually gotten arrested, well past any time he was taking any such risks intentionally, he’d had to wrestle with the irony of it, and curse his past self, and dig deep for that resolution and inner strength he’d had before.

On the bright side, he no longer had a constantly escalating migraine, merely a simple background headache that sometimes spiked, especially after loud meals in the cafeteria.

He still summarized his experience to Ari and himself as “it could be worse,” and “I’m managing better than I expected.”

What he did not voice was the dread that some day, something was going to happen, and his entire ability to hold it together thus far would shatter. He knew so, so many details about how all of this could be worse. If he stayed just like this, if he didn’t get transferred back to a dorm cell, if Trystan wasn’t replaced with someone troublesome, if none of the guards or inmates took a dislike to him… he believed he could make it through this.

Gavin’s only other friend outside of Trystan was Moriine at the library, a large, broad shouldered middle aged man who had been in prison for seven years already, and knew the system better than his home town, he said. Born in the far North in Evaree, he had lived in Cardea or J’Kyris since he was a teen.

Moriine qualified for parole soon, and got the ‘luxury’ of spending the last year of his sentence here in a lower security facility, although that meant losing some of the resources that sometimes went along with longer term placements.

It wasn’t exactly a secret that he had murdered his ex-wife, just like it wasn’t exactly a secret that Trystan had apparently killed someone at South before coming here. No one seemed to care about Moriine’s crime, although Gavin had heard of other men being attacked and even killed for certain crimes against women or children. But seven years into his sentence, Moriine apparently was not the most interesting target anymore, perhaps partially due to the fact that he had to duck to get through doorways and looked like he could easily have thrown this book cart across the room.

“I assumed you heard from someone,” Moriine said with a shrug. “Nothing stays secret here for long.”

“I suppose not.” Gavin carefully schooled his tone, cleaning it of judgment. “Why? I mean…”

“It’s a long story.” Moriine took extra care dusting off the cover of a book. “You’ll never meet a more twisted woman. I don’t regret it for a second.”

Black Xs marked the backs of each of his large hands, as they did a number of other inmates here. They marked those convicted of violent felonies, jokingly referred to among inmates as “free tats.” On Moriine, they blended in with the many other tattoos covering his arms and knuckles, making his brown skin look almost black from a distance.

He said that Gavin could be here for months before his trial date got announced.

“They’re in no rush. I won’t mince it for you - if you’re foreign, or on welfare, or have any history of offense, your papers get shuffled to the back of the line. And it’s a long line. Bureaucracy’s a slow mover.”

“Conveniently slower for some people than others,” Gavin muttered.

“And if you had the money,” Moriine added, “You wouldn’t be so quick to turn down the option to make things go faster or better for yourself, like they do over the border.”

Although Gavin took the opportunity to launch an argument, he had to admit Moriine might have a point. If he’d had the money, would he have paid to get out of here?

There had been a time when he would have stayed if he thought it would send a successful message. But it wouldn’t now, and it would have gotten him killed, then.

A pang of longing hit him with unexpected strength. What he wouldn’t give to see some of the other rebels again, besides Ari. If he could just have a conversation like this with Umani, or Yakovi, or Liat…

But other times he found himself grateful they couldn’t see him now.

Gavin ventured outside with Trystan during rec hour one cool afternoon, and since that went without trouble, it became a regular thing. It seemed in the time since his arrest, summer had turned into autumn. Together they circled the running track, staying out of the way of other inmates, and off the courts that had been claimed. Trystan kicked rocks out of Gavin’s way when he wasn’t too busy peering up at the clouds and off at the distant trees visible over the high walls.

He seemed different out in the yard. Not more relaxed, exactly. Often times inside he seemed too relaxed, overly casual and at ease with things that made Gavin want to shout or smoke or hide. This was a hint at Trystan in his natural habitat, as close to freedom as Gavin was ever going to see him.

A new “shipment” of inmates came in overnight, adding to Gavin’s general sense of dread. The cafeteria was suddenly twice as crowded, and fights broke out far more often. Several of the new inmates were clearly troubled, enough that sometimes the line for food felt more like a meds line in a psych ward.

They brought with them general chaos. Within a day of their arrival, Denna had thrown one of them onto the floor in the middle of the cafeteria. The guards blasted their whistles, and she stepped back, hands in the air before they had a chance to pull her away from her opponent, who sat up slowly. Even from across the room, Gavin could see the pain in the man’s movements.

Even without being the only trans woman in the cell block — “That you know of,” Trystan corrected him — Denna managed to stay relevant to the local gossip, even if only because she was the one you went to if you wanted “hooch,” or because she’d give her friends extra helpings and lunch. It seemed like whenever a fight broke out in the cafeteria, she was in the audience and had taken one side or the other. And then there was the legendary time she’d instigated a food fight, back at South, the detention center she and Trystan had been at before this one.

Trystan once told him quite bluntly that she only got away with as much as she did because she was fucking Officer Larsen, one of the guards.

“Isn’t that illegal?” Gavin asked, disgusted. Larsen had seemed like a decent guy, too, for a prison guard at least. When Gavin needed to ask one of them for something, it was usually Larsen he went to, if he could.

“Yeah, technically,” Trystan said with a shrug. “But none of the other guards care, and nothing’s gonna come of it unless she files an assault report against him. Which she won’t.”

“Because it’d be her word against his.”

“I wouldn’t worry too much about him taking advantage of her. She’s getting way more benefits out of it than he is. All he gets is sex.”

It was hard to pity Denna too much though, especially not when she greeted him with a slap on the back and “How’s it rollin’, Wheels!”

He whirled, slamming his fist into her stomach, but the breath he knocked out of her was a laugh as she backed away. “Take a chill pill!”

“Leave him alone,” Trystan complained, although he sound especially assertive about it.

“Aww, is he _yours_ now?” Denna taunted in a babying voice. “No one else can touch him?”

Gavin took off, face burning. He hated these remarks and assumptions, and she certainly wasn’t the only one. He was even starting to suspect that Moriine was getting… some kind of impression. And maybe they weren’t wrong, at least not entirely. When Trystan was around, most people left him alone.

A good number of the new inmates apparently knew Trystan from before, and fights became a more regular thing. A second time, Gavin found himself backing away when Trystan jumped to his defense. The other inmate backed down almost immediately, and neither of them spoke about it afterward. He felt like he was signing on to something without reading the fine print first.

Some of Trystan’s moves were familiar, spinning, striking and dodging with dizzying speed. It took Gavin a while to place what was familiar, but it brought him back to practice sessions in the safehouse with Liat, curls escaping from her ponytail, bouncing around her head.

“Do you know Dav Kai? Is that the way you learned to fight?” Gavin asked in the rec yard one afternoon, while Trystan absentmindedly stretched.

“Oh, nah, I don’t even know what that is. I just pick stuff up.” Trystan shrugged. “Things I’ve seen, things people’ve used on me.”

“It's a northern martial art,” Gavin said. “At least that’s what some of your moves look like. It’s been a while since I could move like that,” he added with a dry laugh. “But one of my — my friends was excellent at it.”

“One of your ‘friends?’” Trystan prompted.

“She was more Ari’s friend than mine,” Gavin covered up. It was technically true, although he couldn’t say they hadn’t been close and had their own relationship beyond Ari.

They’d been friends. There was no lie in that.

But the word seemed ill-fitting, lacking circumstance. ‘Coworkers’ almost felt like a better summary, he mused, but that wasn’t right either. It didn’t cover how much they’d been like family.

“We can practice, if you’d like.” Trystan spun, throwing an arm out, and grinned at Gavin, who had to resist the impulse to flinch.

“Not here in the rec yard. Maybe another time.”

Trystan fought with quick and vicious purpose, wearing no expression but intense focus. But afterward, sometimes he laughed and grinned, cracking jokes as he combed his fingers through his tangled hair or wiped blood from his face, sometimes almost giddy in a way that was more unsettling than his skill.

It was easy to imagine how he might have been at South, how he might have made enemies.

And it was easy to imagine how he might have killed someone. Maybe just like the Uni Brothers had said, with a subtle shank, or a snapped neck.

He’d told himself he wouldn’t ask or push it, but questions gnawed at him, far more than they did about Moriine’s case. Over the phone, Ari said she had sent out a package with a couple of books, and the obituary of the man Trystan had killed.

Gavin woke again very abruptly the next morning to the crackle of a voice over a radio, loud, in words he didn’t register until well after it had stopped talking. On the other bed, Trystan was sitting up, rubbing at the corner of his eyes. “I wish they didn’t do this at assfuck in the fucking morning,” he grumbled. “We barely got to sleep.”

“What are they doing?”

“Shakedowns.”

They stripped down to their shirts and boxers and put on shower shoes as the intercom had instructed, and Trystan had time to briefly tell Gavin that their possessions would be searched before the door screeched open.

The entire concept of his door being slammed open in the early hours of the morning so cops could catch him off guard to search through his possessions was something so straight out of Gavin’s paranoid phobias it was almost funny. Except it wasn’t funny, and though Trystan seemed unaffected by the process, they had certainly succeeded in catching Gavin at the worst hour of the day. On top of that, his bladder was uncomfortably full, and there was no question of using the bathroom now.

They both were strip searched — why had they even bothered to have clothes on in the first place? — and the seams of each item of clothing carefully felt by one guard as the other prodded and poked every corner, including having Gavin run his hands through his hair, tilt back his head so they could shine a light into his nostrils (and thus also eyes), and lift up his genitalia in case he’d somehow managed to hide something contraband under his ballsack. Since he was able to stand on his one leg, holding on to the railing at the foot of the bed for support, he was made to do this so they could check him from the front and back, as well as examine the chair.

This was Gavin’s third strip search since that sunny afternoon of his arrest, and it only got slightly easier with practice. He’d wanted to cry halfway through the second one, but this time he gritted his teeth (except when he was told to open his mouth and stick out his tongue) through it, and the process was slightly alleviated by catching Trystan’s eye and sharing a look.

But his heart was still pounding by the time he was allowed to redress, and the guards barking at him to hurry up only made him more frazzled. Their hands were cuffed behind their backs, too tightly, Gavin’s back bent awkwardly, and he was pushed out into the hallway after Trystan, where along the long hallway cellmates (mostly in quartets, with some trios and only a few pairs) lined up against the blank patches of wall which did not have doors.

And so Gavin got to watch from across the hall as the guards searched his and Trystan’s belongings, none-too-carefully. That was when he really started to lose it, watching them shake out his books, read through his letters, tear up his bed, tossing his and Trystan’s things on the floor behind them as soon as each item had been investigated, leaving a pile of sheets, clothes, jackets, everything Ari had sent, every book they had from the library, every item they’d bought from commissary…

It was infuriating, but that fury spiraled very quickly into panic, even though he knew they would find nothing in his items that wasn’t supposed to be there, he couldn’t breathe or look away, and the process dragged on forever. _Don_ _’t have a panic attack. Now is not the time to have a panic attack._

God, and he had to pee, too _._

Even as he tried to calm down, he cursed his brain, but everything was already spinning, and even as he squeezed his eyes shut and counted in his head, nightmares and flashbacks played behind his eyelids and the world sounded simultaneously distant and too loud and close, like it came through a megaphone from a few blocks away.

“Hey. Gavin. Gavin?”

Shit, shit, shit. He was aware distantly that people were still around him, and that he must look terrible. Things were happening and he tried desperately to pay attention, but his mind was half hundreds of miles away, years ago, and half in the future, in a million things that could happen to him here and now.

 _If I accomplish anything at all, it_ _’ll be worth it. If I have a break down over a strip search, so be it_.

Had he accomplished anything at all?

“Gavin,” insisted a voice, suddenly much closer, and Gavin jerked, a hand trying to fly up to protect his face, but the sharp edge of the handcuffs caught it.

Trystan crouched beside him, glancing over his shoulder at the guards searching another cell. “You’re okay,” he said, his voice low and an unfamiliar mix of gentle yet firm. “Stop tugging at your arms, please. I know this shit sucks, but you need to keep it together, okay? Come on.”

He kept glancing over his shoulder, his stance tense, ready to jump back up to his feet. Nothing about this was really soothing. It only made Gavin feel that getting his shit together was more urgent, and how he had the added embarrassment of this other inmate trying to reassure him. He couldn’t tell if anyone in the line was pretending not to look.

“Hey, look at me. Gavin.”

He’d never noticed that Trystan had hazel eyes before. The inmate’s face, clear and very focused on him, was well within Gavin’s personal space, but that was the least of his worries just now.

“How ‘bout you breathe with me, okay?”

It wasn’t a bad idea, but Gavin didn’t want to be doing this, not with him, not now. The mere suggestion was humiliating.

 _Fuck_.

Gavin dropped his eyes to the exaggerated rise and fall of Trystan’s shoulders. He was still spinning, his body feeling strangely detached from his head. He sucked in deep breaths, trying to keep them quiet.

He watched his cellmate carefully and slowly stand, mumbling, “Yeah, there you go. Everything’s fine.”

And it was, soon enough. He settled at a pace relatively even to the speed of the guards moving away down the hall, until they were in the last room, and the tightness in Gavin’s chest finally released. He rubbed his cheek on his shoulder, exhaling forcefully. Forcing more deep breaths, which made him lightheaded, he attempted to push the last of the panic out of his body.

“I’m fine,” Gavin muttered, as soon as he could make it sound believable, though his skin was still clammy and his hands quivered.

He shot back into the cell as soon as they’d been given the all clear, and hesitated for a moment, staring at the mess of their room. “I’m fine,” he insisted, feeling Trystan’s eyes on him. “What fucking assholes. Was all this really necessary? God. _Bastards_ ,” he added more vehemently as he picked up Ari’s letter, now emblazoned with a dirty boot print.

Trystan laughed, scooping up his few belongings up from the floor. The cell door slammed shut behind them, and Gavin jumped, then swore again, this time in Ykaternic.

Trystan didn’t talk about their moment in the hallway, and he half watched, half pretended to read his book as Gavin carefully picked up, straightened out, and put away each of the items strewn across the floor.

“It’s not —” Gavin began, when the silence had gone on too long. “Sometimes my brain wiring gets fucked up.”

That sounded better, right? More like a medical, neurological condition and less like _I_ _’m just crazy_ or _I_ _’m a coward who shakes and cries when things scare me_.

“Mmh,” Trystan responded noncommittally.

Gavin couldn’t have brought himself to say thank you even if he’d felt like it was necessary. “You, uh…” he tried. What did you even say after something like that?

“Nothing good comes of causing a diversion during a shakedown,” Trystan said, absentmindedly dog-earing a page of his book.

“I know that — it’s not like I meant to —”

“I didn’t want the guards’ attention on us either.”

“I — right. Yeah, of course not.” Grateful that Trystan was apparently just as eager to put this behind them, Gavin cleared his throat and changed the subject.

He drifted in and out of dreams that evening, half lucid, half simply wandering thoughts, until he was back in the safehouse. It was burning, smoke choking him and flames rushing up the walls as he staggered through hallways and up stairs, lost in the maze of a simple two story house he knew too well. He kept looking for the others, for bodies, but there was nothing.

And then, somehow, he was back at the train station with Liat, but she looked older, and her hair had begun to grey. _“Go_ ,” she urged, and she _burned_. Behind her, the others burned too.

“You’re still there,” Gavin whispered into the darkness of his cell, wide awake, heart pounding. The old horror and guilt of it sank straight through his chest, a two ton anchor plunging down.

 _It_ _s not over just because I moved on. You’re still there. Oh god, I’m so sorry._

There had been no burning house, and there had been no symbolic goodbye at any train station.

There had just been that conversation over coffee at midnight in the cellar. “I can’t tell you if you’re making the ‘right’ choice, leaving,” she’d said. “If I still had my husband and son — maybe I would leave with them too. But… I have to say, I never thought you’d be one of the ones to back down and run.”

He’d thought too much about that last statement in the years since, about what it said about him. How long had it been since he’d thought about her, really properly thought about her? His thoughts often went first to his family, and then to the dead who he tried desperately _not_ to think about but could never really avoid. But Liat, who honestly had barely been someone he noticed at the beginning of it all, when she was just some woman who was there…

She was still there, in Ykatern, if she was still alive at all. They’d left her, and who would have thought she’d be the last one left out of the original core he’d known?

“Of course I’m still here,” came Trystan’s voice from the dark, and Gavin realized he must have voiced some thought aloud. “It’s not like I’m going anywhere else.”


End file.
